George Jonas: Prisoners of the past

Prisoners of the past

I’ve yet to be asked to sing for my supper, but I am asked now and again to speak for it. Occasionally I oblige, not because I enjoy speaking but because I enjoy eating, and see a direct relationship between two.

People who feed pundits are usually up-to-date types who like to know where the action is, some to make sure they don’t miss it, and some to make sure they do. Either way, they share the illusion that people who comment on events know something about them.

Although some commentators shatter that illusion every time they open their mouths or boot up their computers, on the whole, illusions are indestructible. It’s a good thing for us content providers, because if people stopped asking: “What’s going on?” we’d have to adjust to outdoor living.

The poet Alexander Pope said that “a little learning is a dangerous thing” (as opposed, one supposes, to a lot of learning). Plucking one apple from the Tree of Knowledge only gets you into hot water with the Creator, even if gobbling up all the apples would make you the hot ticket in Paradise. If so, is it more dangerous to learn a little history than none?

Let’s approach the question like this. I’m old but, not surprisingly, if my mother were alive, she would be older still. In fact, she would be 107, almost to the day, because she was born in December 1905.

1905 was a long time ago — and yet it wasn’t. It was the year Wilbur Wright broke the half-hour barrier for heavier-than-air flight by staying aloft in the Wright Flyer III for 39 minutes. Fancy that! Truly, the sky was no longer the limit. My mother was six months senior to the special theory of relativity, because she entered the world in December, and Albert Einstein didn’t publish his paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies until the end of June. Mother always considered relativity as her contemporary.

So my mother was born in the modern era: The era of flight, the era of relativity, the era of women’s suffrage and, of course, the era of income tax. If anyone had suggested to grandmother and grandfather that Europe was about to enter the darkest period of its history, they would have laughed.

“Where have you been over the past 30 years?” they would have asked. “Hiding in the dark ages? Even the autocratic Czar of Russia is setting up a parliament of sorts this year, the Duma. Science and medicine are advancing by leaps and bounds. The 20th century is going to be the age of liberalism, enlightenment and progress.”

My grandparents would have said this in the year my mother was born. By the time she was 12, Lenin’s Communists were in power in Russia; by the time she was 17, Mussolini’s fascists took over Italy and by the time she was 27 Germany was ruled by Hitler’s Nazis. She was turning 41 as Stalin’s Communists grabbed the former Nazi or Nazi-occupied parts of Europe, not to relinquish most until the Soviet empire’s collapse in 1991. By then, mother was 86 and there were only nine years left of the 20th century.

How could my grandparents have been so wrong? They were conventional people, but not ill-informed. Their errors were derived from being up-to-date. My grandfather was a publisher, a partner in his own firm, who read rather carefully the things he published. Perhaps if he hadn’t, he would have seen the future more clearly.

Many people choose to extrapolate tomorrow from today. They feel that things that have come our way are good predictors of things to come. If they’re right, we can look forward to more rogue dynasties abroad, and more WikiLeakers at home. The former may or may not be nuclear-capable, and the latter may or may not be alleged rapists. Extrapolating the second decade of the 21st century from the first puts us up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Some of us might conclude we can’t reliably identify trends or assume they will continue. Tomorrow is another day, not just more of today. We may be up the creek, but there’s a paddle knocking around somewhere.

But we can neither outwit history nor second-guess it. Like a winding staircase, it always reaches the same point in a different space. George Santayana warned us that people who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it. He forgot to add that people who remember the past are doomed to repeat it, too. A past remembered is a wrong unforgotten, and a future extrapolated from a remembered wrong is a prophecy self-fulfilled. It’s pretty much the history of Europe and the whole history of the Middle East.

It’s difficult to learn from experience when the same thing keeps happening in different ways. What if we required decision makers to demonstrate a complete ignorance of the past? Not the little tendentious semi-ignorance that many leaders demonstrate today, but an honest-to-goodness total blank. Would it be better?

Probably not. Considering the dog’s breakfast we’re making of the world, though, it could hardly be worse.